The growth of electronic communications networks, such as the Internet, as well as various intranets, extranets, and other local area networks (LANs) and wide area networks (WANs) has presented a fertile ground in which to transact commerce. The amount of commerce transacted on-line over these networks has grown such that online or electronic commerce (also known as “e-commerce”) has become a major channel through which goods and services are bought and sold. In parallel with the growth in electronic commerce has come a growth in the information available regarding the goods and services available for sale online. As this growth has occurred, online providers of goods and services have sought to develop ever more efficient means of linking potential customers with the goods and services sought by those potential customers.
Despite these efforts, inefficiencies continue to pervade the mechanisms used to transact e-commerce. At present, potential customers have numerous locations from which to obtain information regarding goods and services for sale online. Many of these locations provide the potential customers with the ability to capture and evaluate information regarding the goods and services for sale at that particular location. However, the potential customers are not provided with a satisfactory tool for capturing, cataloging and evaluating the information gathered at all of these locations against each other, nor are they provided with a tool for updating the information that they have captured and cataloged. Likewise, potential customers are left with no tool for capturing information regarding products and services for sale online and products and services for sale offline in a single location. Instead, the potential customer is left to individually visit multiple locations to manually catalog the information captured at one location against information captured at other locations. The potential customer must manually evaluate the information captured online against other information captured online and against information captured offline. Potential customers are further required to individually re-visit each location (both online or offline) to update previously captured information. Without an adequate tool that enables the potential customer to efficiently and effectively capture, aggregate, catalog, evaluate, and update information from all sources in a single place, potential customers find themselves ill equipped to evaluate the myriad collection of often varying prices, inventories, and terms under which the goods and services that they are seeking to purchase are being offered for sale both online and offline. As a result, the online purchasing process often proves far less efficient and effective than other sales channels. Untold online business opportunity is lost when potential customers become overwhelmed with the information available to them in the online purchasing process and never reach the point of consummating their sale. Likewise, untold future sales are lost as post-sale frustration ensues when the customers realize that their purchase did not take place at the price and on the terms that were the most favorable available to them at the time of sale because they failed to fully and effectively evaluate all of the information and options available to them both online and offline.
Thus, while e-commerce is a viable channel of selling goods and services, from the viewpoint of the consumer, it is often not an efficient and effective channel of buying goods and services. It would be highly desirable to have a method and apparatus that enabled consumers to more fully utilize the possibilities of e-commerce.